
Qass £-'^ - 



Book. 



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THE MARTYR-PRESIDENT. 



A SERMON 



I'REArHEI) IN 



THE CHURCH OF ST. PAUL, LEAVENWORTH, 

ON THE FIRST SUNDAY AFTP]R EASTER. 



AND AGAIN BY REQUEST 



ON THE NATIONAL FAST DAY 



JUNK 1st, IH60. 



BY THE REV. JOHN H. EGAR, B, D., 



RECTOR. 



LEAVENWORTH: 

VR[NTED AT THE UULLETIN JOB l'RINTIN<4 ESTABLISHMENT 



THE MARTYR-PRESIDENT. 



A SERMON 

PREACHED IN 

THE CHURCH OF ST. PAUL, LEAVENWORTH, 

ON THE FIRST SUNDAY AFTER EASTER, 

AND AGAIN BY REQUEST 

ON THE NATIONAL FAST DAY, 

TUNE 1st, 18Q3. 



BY THE REV. JOHN H. EGAR. B. D., 



RECTOR. 



LEAVENWORTH : 

PRINTED AT THE BULLETIN JOB PRINTING ESTABLISHMENT. 



Leavenworth City, Kansas, June 1, 1865. 

Ri'V. John 11. Egar, Rector of the Church of ,SV. Foul, Leaven- 
ivorfh, Kansas: 

Sir: In common with many other of your parishioners, we 
desire to see the influence of the sermon preached by you this 
morning on the assassination of the late President extended to a 
wider circle than had the opportunity of hearing its delivery, be- 
lieving that much good may be effected thereby ; we would, there- 
fore, most respectfully request a copy for publication in pamphlet 
form. Very respectfully, yours, 

E. N. 0. CLOUGH, 
M. P. RIVELY, 
CIEO. W. NELLES. 
JOHN KERR. 
J. C. HEMINGRAY. 



Leavenworth, June 2, 1865. 
Col. E. N. 0. doughy and others : 

Gentlemen : Though my own judgment considers the ser- 
mon delivered by me yesterday to be not quite up to the standard 
which I think justifies printing, yet the suggestion of those who 
heard it, that good may be done by its circulation, leaves me no 
alternative but to place the manuscript at their disposal. 
Yours respectfully, 

JOHN H. EGAR. 



S l] E M O N 



"He being dead, yet speaketh." — Heb. xi, 4. • 

These words, as you remember, were spoken by St. Paul of 
Abel, the second son ol* our first fotlier, Adam, whose short me- 
morial in the Old Testament, seems to have been recorded as the 
type offthe history of this wicked world ; where what is good and 
noble, and pure, and true, seems to be foreign and alien, and to 
provoke the most malignant efforts of diabolical hatred. If we are 
ever tempted to forget that this world is not the home of goodness 
and truth, ever recurring experience brings it back to us ; the in- 
tenser malice of our powerful and eternal enemy is aroused at the 
nearer prospect of their triumph ; and the history of Abel recurs in 
every page of the larger history of universal humanity. The second 
son of our first father, Adam — the second person born into this 
world — the first person who died under the curse pronounced upon 
all mankind ; the first victim of that terrible root of sin and crime 
planted in the world by the transgression of his parents, which 
bore fruit instantly in full and dire perfection of evil, was the inno- 
cent sufferer under the greatest, most dreadful crime of all that 
humanity is capable of — murder — assassination. The parallel in 
the fact re-produced in this last act of our national history, justifies 
the appropriation of the test to him whom the nation at this time 
mourns with a deep and swelling sorrow, its murdered President. 
" He being dead, yet speaketh." He speaks from a bloody grave, 
a martyr to the national integrity now all but re-established, by 
his fearful and inauspicious death, by his simple, blameless, single- 
hearted, earnest life ; by his fulfillment of the high responsibilities 
of the chief station in the Government — speaks more emphatically, 
by the connection between this crime, and the crime against the 
nation; by the causality which the Divine will, without whose 
Providence no life is begun or ended, permitted to be the means of 
calling him away from the world. He died at the moment most 
fortunate for his fame ; when the plans which he had matured were 
meetin"- their full success, when the instruments he had chosen had 



(» 

justified his insiglit by their efficiency, when the vision of a re- 
united nation had risen fully above the horizon, and the dark night 
of national danger was merging into day ; and his martyr's death 
v/ill stamp all that is good in his history indelibly on the hearts of 
i':e people, and bind his memory by all that is good and holy and 
virtuous and patriotic — by the shame for the deed, and the sorrow 
at its success — by all that reverences authority, and all that respects 
character, and all that rises indignantly against crime — to the soul 
of the Republic, to live as long as history is read, and martyrdom 
consecrates the principles for which it is endured. 

It is our duty, brethren, both in respect to the memory of our 
late Chief Magistrate, and also to fulfill all we can of our office, not 
only as teachers of religion but of virtue, to gather together accord- 
ing to our poor ability, the lessons which the present calamity — for 
a national calamity it is of the deepest character — presents to our 
minds. To this, then, let us address ourselves, praying for the 
Divine blessing to enable us to consider the subject with the words 
of Christian truth and soberness. 

I. The crime of murder, considered without respect to station 
or any other extraneous circumstance — considered as against any 
one who bears our common nature — is one which is, and which 
needs to be met with the utmost abhorence. The murderer of whom- 
soever, high or low, is an object of Divine wrath, and the curse of 
Uod, and of the detestation and horror of all thinking people. But 
brethren, this crime — and it may have been permitted to teach us 
the sacredness of human life — sinks into the nation's heart deeper 
than can any private crime ; not because it is physically less easy to 
kill a President than a private citizen, not because it needs a heavier 
bullet to do its fearful work ; but because, inthis conspicuous exam- 
ple, the moral foundation of our institutions is attacked, and the very 
law itself of our national and social being is assaulted in this dread- 
ful crime. It is in vain to seek to disconnect it from the chain of 
causes which has brought upon the country all the devastation and 
bloodshed of the past years. We may, and for the honor of our 
common nature, we will hope that it is no part of the organized 
effort to disrupt the country — that it is the private act of a few des- 
perate conspirators, too cowardly to stand in tlie ranks of open war- 
fare; but it is none the less true, that it is a calamity and a crime 
growing out of the cause of all the other calamities which have 
afflicted the nation in every nev. ■ (if its manifold life; and, there- 



fore, that the ultimate responsibility for it, as for all the other 
effects of this state of things, foreseen and unforeseen, must by dire 
necessity rest upon and be borne as best it may, by those whom the 
public opinion of the world will judge as the authors of all this mis- 
chief. It was as the executive of national law — the repository of 
constitutional power, exerted by mighty armies to preserve the 
unity of the nation, that the late President was the object of the 
individual hate of the worthless drunkard who took hia life — aside 
from that no human being would have borne him malice — it was 
his responsibility in his office to uphold the trust which it was his 
above all others to uphold, which made him the assassin's mark. 
It was an effort against the very life of the nation ; and it is this 
which arouses the terror and the sorrow that moves the nation to 
the depths of its nature. For if the minister of the law, be he high 
or low, be not safe in his person in carrying out those measures 
which are necessary for government — whether it be by marshalled 
armies or by individual police, makes no difference — where then is 
the guarantee of social order ? where is the bulwark against wild 
anarchy and universal destruction? And this, brethren, it is, which is 
the underlying principle of this mighty struggle. The possibility of 
free government under the universal supremacy of law, whether our 
institutions were sufficiently strong to uphold the fundamental con- 
dition of our lives, our liberties and our manifold interests, though 
the universal obedience. to those conditions of all the parts and sec- 
tions of the country, P]ast, West, North and South alike — it was 
against this, when armies had failed, that the assassin's hand was 
raised — raised, just at the moment when the solution of the question 
seemed to be attained — raised fearfully, with self avenging success^ 
to spread its effects beyond the immediate criminals to the antece- 
dent causes — to make the terms of reconciliation harder, and to 
repress the budding magnanimity of successful vindication by the 
stern resolve to exact the extreme penalty. 

I do not say that this revulsion of feeling is desirable, and I do 
not say that it is not desirable. There is at this time and in this 
place a higher and a nobler use to be made of the terrible crime and 
awful calamity, than to make it the text of denunciation of that 
misguided people who are now suffering so fully the penalties of 
their great mistake. It is to take account of the virtues in the 
character of him whom we mourn. In the presence of so recent 
and so sudden and so terrible a death, the personal peculiarities 



8 

the minor mistakes, if any there were, the incidental trivialities, the 
partial misunderstandings, the party animosities are forgotten, and 
we seek for and dwell upon those great, broad, noble characteristics of 
our better nature, which are the deep substratum of humanity, and 
we seek to sum up the life-work of him who is taken away. And 
surely we cannot but recognize in one who, born in the floorless 
cabin of a Western wilderness, by his own industry, clear sighted- 
ness, honesty of purpose, and sympathy with the heart of the nation , 
won for himself the call to the seat of the great founder of the Re- 
public, and who, under circumstances of equal responsibility and 
complexity with the birth-throes of the Revolution, so carried on 
the great work committed to him as not to be laid aside when the 
term of his first election ceased, those great qualities which made 
hie pre-eminence of station not a mere fortuitous conjunction of 
accidents, but the testimony for all time, to a fitness for the work, 
to principles which were necessary and just and true, to an adapta- 
tion to the place and the occasion, sufficiently complete to give him 
a name in history by his own right. If we have any faith in hu- 
manity, if these earthly interests which compel so large a share of 
our time and thought and absorbing care, are realities of Divine 
Providence, if there is any hope of a triumph of human nature ove^ 
its ills, and a real progress in the history of mankind, if God is the 
ruler of the world and his instruments are fitted to his operations, 
then "he being dead, yet speaketh," by an example, which in its 
essential particulars we may imitate, and a work which in its gen- 
eral scope and design his survivors must complete. 

1 1. We may attribute to the deceased President, without 
fear that the judgment of history will reverse the decision, a con- 
scientious devotion to the great trust with which he was charged, 
and an honest purpose to discharge it to the best of his understand- 
ing of its requirements, and of his ability to meet them. The proof 
of this is the course of his administration as a whole, and the com- 
plete revelation of the man in his endeavors towards the preserva- 
tion and the permanent security of the nation's unity. It would be 
superfluous to attempt the enumeration of the acts in which this 
spirit showed most conspicuously ; and in like manner it would be 
impertinent to offer an unlearned opinion upon any measures which 
he thought necessary to accomplish the end in view. There are 
doubtless those here present, the course ol" whose studies has been 
directed that way in the practice of a learned and laborous profes- 



sion, at whose feet it would be my proper place to sit and be taught 
in matters of this nature ; and it is no derogation from them to say 
that he was at least their equal in that profession to which his life 
and theirs have been directed , and, therefore, that his opinion of 
the legal authority of these acts which have been the most dicusssed 
is neither to be confirmed norcalled in question by those like my- 
self, whose studies, if they are faithful to their high calling, are 
turned in another and widely different direction. The tribunal of 
ultimate decision on such questions is neither the pulpit nor the 
press. It is ours to look, in this place, not at the legal formalities 
which limit and define actions in their external shape, but, as far as 
we can, at the inner spring and source of the life which animates 
them. And I am confident that all, however, divided in opinion 
respe<!ting the particular measures developed by the course of events, 
whether they seemed to them too fast or too slow, too mild or too 
severe, will agree, now that the end is seen, that the spirit and in- 
tention of the man and the magistrate, shining through all the diffi- 
culties of position and circumstance, in a state of things unprece- 
dented in the history of the world, was a highly conscientious^ 
honest, patriotic spirit. He was in his exercise of the powers of the 
(Tovernment, a patriotand not a politician. The two are wide apart. 
The difference between them is indelibly stamped upon the percep- 
tions of all right-minded and intelligent men. The general voice 
of public opinion speaks of the one with contempt as surely as of 
the other with approval ; and the difference between them is simply 
that of the internal, conscious rectitude and conscientousness and 
devotion to principle and to country — the unselfish devotion to duty 
and to responsibility, — which contrasts, by the whole space between 
light and darkness, with the hollow, insincere, selfish, mean and 
crooked course of unprincipled greed and unhallowed ambition. 

We may add to this sterling integrity, as another evident part 
of his character, a judicious firmness and a practical wisdom in the 
development of his plans and the selection of his instruments, and a 
clear perception of the times and steady consistency in shaping the 
progress of events toward the attainment of the end in view. It is 
evident that he was, as his position required him to be, the master 
spirit in his Cabinet ; that his subordinates were subordinate, and 
that, though he called statesmanlike ability and organizing tact, 
and trusty council to his side, yet that his actions werc^his^own, and) 
therefore, that he is to be judged by the success of his measures* 



10 

and not stinted by the reward they return. It was his labor, not 
only to prevent the present disruption of the nation, but to secure, 
if possible, its permanent and lasting pacification ;to keep the nation 
one, not only for the few years of his term of ofiice, but as far as in 
him lay, to dig the foundations of a broader and deeper structure of 
unity and prosperity for the common country of us all. lie lived 
long enough to see the beginning of the end for which he labored. 
The result must tell in the centuries that are to come, whether he 
has been successful; but this at least is clear, that as he was con- 
scientiously and honestly devoted to his work, so he brought to it 
those qualities of character, that firmness of purpose, that practical 
wisdom in phmning, that judicious discrimination of opportunity in 
executing, that insight in chosing his chief helpers, that singleness 
of aim, and power of seizing on circumstances to s;et forward that 
aim, Which, under the irresistible logic of events, has approved 
itself to the people as sagacious, and consistent, and necessary, 
and which we may hope, under (lod's blessing, will result, not only 
in re-uniting our country, but in perpetuating its peace, and adding 
to the happiness and prosperity of all sections and of every indi- 
vidual. 

And here again we cannot too highly appreciate these quali- 
ties of the late President, in their effect upon the destiny of the 
country. The singular freedom of his nature from all dramatic 
eff"ect or rhetorical artifice blinds us to the weight of his influence, 
until we carefully analyse the exact history of the times. It is 
one thing to see the judiciousness of measures after they have suc- 
ceeded, it is another thing to foresee their effect ; and this was his 
prerogative. The ability to reduce order out of the chaos of public 
opinion, to lead the preponderating power of the country, by a 
steady progress, step by step, to unity of opinion and steadiness of 
resolve, as the necessary antecedent to external unity restored, to 
be firm in judgment and merciful in disposition, and so to temper 
each with the other, as to sacrifice neither, to adapt the policy to 
the circumstances and yet to keep in view the single end of all 
operations, was not less necessary for the nation, than evident in 
him who had the destinies of the nation in his earthly keeping. 
It requires no extraordinary memory to recall the vacillation and 
uncertainty which held the minds of men in unbearable suspense, 
during the months immediately preceding and at the beginning of 
his incumbency. The press of those days wj united upon none 



11 

of the issues involved. Party maxims had no authority upon 
which to fjround an opinion as to the course to be pursued. The 
uncertainty was not only as to the next step to be taken, but as to 
the general direction in which to move. It was a period of anxious 
waiting for the authoritative voice of the government ; and never, 
perhaps, in the history of the nations, was there a time when gov- 
ernment was so thrown upon itself to be in truth the leader and 
director of the people, as in those days of the beginning of the 
modern history of the llepublic. There was no organized and 
settled public opinion to indicate the way, no path beaten by the 
footsteps of old established precedent, or surveyed and mapped out 
by the logic of precise theory, in which the nation knew that it 
was to march. Men tiirned to the new and untried administration 
as the only guide in their perplexity. The strong deep instinct 
of devotion was in their hearts, but the way in which to exert it 
was not plain. And yet in this time of suspense, the utterances of 
the government were not hasty and unreflecting. The suspense 
might be painful ; but the consequences of a false estimate of the 
position would be fatal. And when the government did develop 
its method of procedure, the course pursued reflected equal lustre 
upon the practical sagacity of the head of the nation, and the true 
loyalty to authority of the mass of the people. The principle ol' 
obedience to the constituted depositaries of the law, because they 
are clothed with the authority of the law, (which is the only true 
meaning of the word loyalty, and upon which the very existence of 
our institutions depends) receives its most sublime illustration in 
the spontaneous response which met fully the demands of the gov- 
ernment as soon as its will was declared — the more marked as 
following upon the preceding uncertainty — proves that the sense 
and realization of constituted authority, as distinguished from mere 
personal influence or personal opinion, is a stable foundation of our 
national freedom. And that that confidence thus fully given at 
first was never afterwards withdrawn — that amid all the impatience 
of some, and the hostile criticism of others, the people still recog- 
nized and confided in him for their leader, is proof sufficient that 
that leader had the sound practical judgment which the occasion 
required, adapted his action to the times, made a fit selection of 
associates in council and subordinates in action, and pursued his 
general course in the exigencies of the nation, with a wisdom and 
independence and a straight forwardness as rare as they were ue- 



12 

cessary to adapt to the principles by which he was guided, the 
public mind and temper by which he must be sustained. 

And thirdly, we may discover in the late President, an un- 
failing faith in the rectitude and the final triumph of the principles 
which he brought to the administration of public aff'airs. The cir- 
cumstances under which he entered upon his incumbency of his 
high office were such as might have made any man falter ; but he 
kept heart, and infused it into the people, and secured them to 
himself, because he had principles and he had faith in them. He 
had. as I have already remarked, comparatively no training in 
statesmanship ; but it might have been that .such training would 
have been gained at the expense of principle. A long and exclu 
KJve devotion to public life is apt to sink the patriot into the poli- 
tician—and, steady principle wanting, no practical wordly wisdom 
will supply its place. This can be obtained in subordinates, that 
cannot be dispensed with in the chief. His election was an infusion 
of new blood into the decaying- vitals of public aftairs — the ele- 
vation of one immediately from among the people ; who, being in 
sympathy with the popular heart should confirm and steady it, 
and keep it true to the aspirations which it honestly entertained. 
And indeed, through all his character this was prominent, his 
being one with the mass of the people in all their better nature — 
his kindliness of heart, and geniality of temper, his unassuming- 
manners and frank directness of speech and address, — all that is 
public and all that is private in his character and actions, now 
that the mists of prejudice are swept away by his sad and sudden 
death — will be recognized as of one who was emphatically of the 
people, and a leader among their hosts. 

And indeed, it was this thorough honesty and straight- forward- 
ness of character — this simple rectitude in pi'ivate as well as in 
public life, which was his great strength with the people of the 
country. P]ven those who made his election to the Chief Magis- 
tracy the pretext of the attempt to break up the Union, feel and 
confess that they have lost in him their best and truest friend. 
And it may be, by that Providence which brings good out of evil, 
that his martyrdom may exert an influence more potent than any 
other cause to turn the hearts of the disobedient children of the Re 
public to the Government of their Fathers. There are arguments 
plausible enough to those who are under their influence for the ap- 
peal to arms ; but the crime of assassination is too palpable to the 



13 

most obtuse mind uot to produce a horror of the cause which it is 
Hought to advance by sucli meaus. lu such a death, the scales drop 
from the eyes of prejudice, and of hatred itself, and the conscience 
opens to the real moral conditions involved. The world does him 
justice now, and sees that in him the nation sought to its foundations 
and quarried the strong tough granite of simple honesty and uncor- 
rupted .sincerity for the base of her re-edifieation. Comparatively 
unknown before his selection for the Presidency, and altogether 
unused to the arts which are the stock-in-trade of the professional 
statesman — the trivial expedients by which party politicians post- 
pone action and evade responsibility, and hide under precedent and 
do nothing with busy earnestness, ho came to the conduct of public 
aifairs, at a time when such arts would have been chaff in the whirl- 
wind, with a strength in the rugged instincts of natural virtue which 
was better than all art, more timely than all expediency, truer than 
all precedent, and equal to all responsibility. The times required 
a recurrence to first principles; they were past dallying with accord- 
ing to the recognized forms of parliamentary and political inaction. 
Years and years before the spirit of secession became overt rebellion 
it was a deep and solemn question in the minds of thinking and 
religious men, whether the nation was uot about to be broken up ; 
whether it could live with the corruption and dishonesty circulatiuti,- 
in its life-blood, which selfish politicians had infused into its veins 
and arteries. The tactics of party had well nigh stifled government 
itself. Shrewdness and astuteness and cunning had so overlaid the 
true wisdom of righteousness with the multiplicity and success of 
their arrangements for moving the masses, that honest and sincere 
men washed their hands of the consequence, and retired from the 
unequal contest with the professional gambler in the spoils of office. 
The evil brooding in sullen shapeless darkness upon the face of the 
land, took shape more suddenly than was looked for, and ere men 
woke to the reality, the crisis was upon them. It was a day when 
the ordinary maxims of political action had no force. Something 
more was necessary than oftice-seeking cunning, and the art of 
bargain and sale. That Providence which rules mankind, made 
him the available man, and so guided his election, and brought to 
the Chief Magistracy his sterling honesty, his sound unsophisticated 
sense of right and wrong, his uncorrui)tcd mind and heart. During 
the four years of his first incumbency, the nation learned that tlie 
simplicity and the directness of a recurrence to first principles — to 



14 

honor and honesty and justice and truth — are the only sure founda- 
tion of stability and permanence. A second election was a tribute to 
the broad, genial characteristics of an honest Western life, stamping 
it with approval after the fiery trial. And now, though his perish- 
able body is laid in its mother earth, he himself stands in history 
like one of the granite statues which face an old Egyptian temple, 
the representative of what the men of this nation must be, and of 
what, by the discipline of God, wc hope and believe they are be- 
C'oming through the purifying crucible of the national tribulation. 
And it may be another reason for the permission by Providence of 
this tragedy, that the country needed it to fix the lesson forever in 
the hearts of men. The principle of martyrdom consecrates and 
hallows every witness to great and holy truth. The baptism of 
blood and the crown of fire arc everywhere the .Divine symbols of 
the ultimate triumph of the right. The martyred President would 
have been none the less honest, none the less kind, none the less 
sincerely desirous to save even his enemies, had he not been stricken 
down ; but he would not have passed into history with the same 
nimbus of glory that now surrounds his memory. His image would 
not have struck so deeply into the heart of the nation, and the force 
of his example, and the purity of his life, and tlie|grandeur of his 
character would have failed of half their lesson to posterity. Even 
now, let us hope, there is in the atmosphere around us the impulse 
of a better, higher, more noble aim for our energies. God grant 
that this impulse may exert its full efiect upon our own generation 
and upon those who are to come after us. 

III. It is a judgment which history will confirm, that the 
position of the nation this day, — its ordered movement through 
the hurried series of events of the past four years — the gerniinant 
principles of its future course — owe as much to the personal cha- 
racteristics of the man thus feebly and imperfectly sketched, as to 
any other single human instrumentality. A people can no more 
act in unity and concert without a leader in sympathy with their 
instincts, than an army without a general in whom they have con- 
fidence. The late President is one of the main links which bind 
the future to the past. It needs only to contemplate the different 
possibilities which might have come to pass, contrasting them with 
what is now the accomplished fact, to see this. Circumstances and 
the Mian combine to make up the lesson of his history, and neither 
is an empty cypher. Without the circumstances the man would 



15 

have lived comparatively unknown, and died unmarked ; without 
the man, the circumstances might have developed differently. The 
examples in history of rulers who have not risen to the height of 
great occasions are too numerous not to be capable of application to 
illustrate the possible condition of a President unequal to the task. 
Four years ago there seemed to be two at least, — and perhaps 
Miany — different possibilities. Unity, or Disunion, or Universal 
Anarchy depended, humanly speaking, upoa the administration. 
In the progress of the nation from its infant existence to its 
growth over half a continent, there had developed too great diver- 
sity of social states, as the principle of discord. Moral ideas on 
the one side, and material interests on the other, entered into con- 
flict,and the time had come to solve permanently the question wheth- 
er diverse social states should develop into diverse nationalities, or 
whether national unity should be preserved by making the social 
state everywhere the same. Two answers were possible then ; one 
has been given now, never to be reversed, by the grace of Provi- 
dence using him as its chief instrument. The institution of slav- 
ery has fallen before the principle of national supremacy, the 
guarantee that the country once pacified will remain permanently 
secure. With this guarantee, his great work, all lesser question, 
are of no importance. Not that it is due to him alone. Ideas 
and forces had to be called into activity and guided to their re- 
sults, and without them he would have been powerless. But as 
the helmsman at the wheel guides the direction of all the forces 
(none of which he could originate) which give motion to the ship ; 
so it was his, here to restrain, there to impel onward, and so to 
bring the ship of state thus far on its course. 

The work, brethren, is not yet ended. It is our country which 
has suffered, though it triumphs in its suffering. After war comes 
peace ; and the result of war at this moment is so sure and certain, 
that all can look for peace in the shortest, surest way, — peace 
that shall be permanent and enduring. It is the business of the 
people now to heal the nation's wounds. The same God who called 
him by the people's voice to the helm, and granted him to sec so 
much accomplished, still rules in Heaven, and has frustrated the 
plot to throw the government into confusion, has preserved his 
successor, and assigns our pathway between those fences of IMercy 
and Judgment which hedge round all human walks, whether of 
the individual or the community. "By Him kings rule, and princes 



16 

decree justice." It may suit the presumption which reckons itself 
competent to pi-oclaim beforehand on every occasion the secret 
counsels of the Almighty and Infinitely Wise Being, who has de- 
clared that "His thoughts are not as our thoughts, nor His ways 
as our ways," to expound what is or what ought to be the policy 
henceforward of the Cxovernment, the chief depositary of whose 
power has been changed by Divine permission and by human 
crime. I humbly decline the endeavor. I believe in the Provi- 
dence of God, and that that Providence vindicates itself in the re- 
sult, though its counsels may not be known beforehand, except by 
prophetic Inspiration ; and I am sincerely of the opinion, that they 
who by that Providence are vested with the trust taken from the 
hand of him we mourn, are abundantly competent to consider their 
responsibilities without my advice, and to resolve wisely and to 
act well. Providence calls us to the humbler duty of obedience 
to the powers that are by His ordaining. To them it is for us 
to look for guidance, and for them it is ours to pray, that God will 
give them the wisdom and the strength to secure to our posting 
the heritage given to our fathers, and to bring the storm -tossed 
ship of state, securely into the harbor of a stable and permanent 
peace. 



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S'12 



